http://www.manaflask.com/en/article/...-and-nostalgia
"I realize, like most of WoW nostalgics out there, that the game was flawed at that time. We’re not delusional in thinking that World of Warcraft was perfect 7-8 years ago, far from it. But there’s more to a game than its technical part, especially in MMO’s there’s the community factor. You can have the best game out there, and if you have no one playing it, it’s worthless. And don’t think I’m delusional about the old community either, it was filled with equal amounts of morons, retards and c**ts that it is today, but it was the old guys… ones that were a part of your personal experience and thus much better than the kids today. I played a warlock, second most broken class in a very broken game, if anyone experienced the un-finished and un-polished state of the game at the time, it was warlocks and hunters. I have no illusions about it; WoW was flawed in more than one aspect. Even putting aside bad servers, an impractical travel system, gross unbalance between classes and builds, the game was at its rawest, its most primal and for most people its most fun. There’s something about the way things worked, you didn’t teleport around the world, and you had a feeling of continuity and a feeling of being in one big shared world. Nowadays, and in most modern MMO’s, there’s very little need for travel and knowing your surroundings and community, someone might instantly dismiss the old ways as obsolete and needlessly time consuming, but it did draw you closer to the realm and its people. Yeah, traveling to the completely opposite site of the world just to join a different battleground does sound and was very tedious and annoying, but the impracticality of it made you actually have a feeling that you were a part of the server, much more than today. Not that I ever liked it, and not that I really ever liked gathering a group for hours at a time, just to see them get lost on the way to the instance, losing my mind while trying to organize even the simplest of 5 man groups, I did miss it once it was not needed anymore."